Yeah, and my understanding is that sadly he was right too. As are you that in Europe things are very different: the author acknowledges that too. Basically my understanding is that Europe is so far from the USA that the iPhone did a first step (but wasn't quite there yet) and the Nexus One did the second one.
While I completely agree with you (I am European) I think Apple is pretty US centric (as is Google). When Jobs said that the iPhone was only available in the USA, and most of its audience was probably american too.
So yeah, I think he was talking about the USA. He either didn't know about the rest of the world, or he didn't care about it.